


coming to amerika

by stirringsofconsciousness



Series: Berte and Krugkoppe [2]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Berte and Krugkoppe, Drabbles, F/M, Freeform, Historical AU, The Holocaust, The warnings may change, Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, a sequel that several people asked for, death is described, i give you the 20th century american jewish experience, immigrants and immigration, the 20th century is now history how rude, the ratings may change, you wanted the 20th century american jewish experience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:54:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21902581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stirringsofconsciousness/pseuds/stirringsofconsciousness
Summary: Berte and Krugkoppe come to Amerika to start a new life together. (a story in drabbles)the plan is to post one drabble per night for all eight nights of Chanukah. Chag sameach!
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Series: Berte and Krugkoppe [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1577683
Comments: 90
Kudos: 45
Collections: 6th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees, Home for the HoliDale





	1. ship

**Author's Note:**

> this is not the Chanukah story I planned to write for Berte and Krugkoppe, but it's the Chanukah story I'm writing.
> 
> Massive thanks to whatwillthegirlbecome, whose love for Berte and Krugkoppe keeps inspiring me to write more. <3
> 
> Many thanks also to my dear village_skeptic, who beta-read when my eyes blurred.

The first marriage bed they have is one hard plank to sleep on. They sleep side-by-side, wearing all of their clothes, hearing the noises of others snoring, shouting, cursing, crying, laughing, vomiting all around them. Their third-class tickets give them steerage passage and no better, no windows, no light, no safety.

Steerage is not merely crowded, it’s stuffed, all of the people packed together like salted fish in a shop’s barrel. It smells. It is alternately uncomfortably warm or -- when the port is open to the sea air -- freezing cold. It is the most discomfort Berte has ever endured in her young life. Krugkoppe has had it worse, but never for so long.

(Years in the future, Velvela will protest when they talk about their voyage. "It wasn't so bad," she'll say. "You make it sound so awful."

When Krugkoppe will press her, Velvela will admit she had traveled first-class, with a cabin to herself, and a window. "But it surely wasn't so bad, down there. It couldn't have been."

At the look in Berte's eyes, Krugkoppe will hold his tongue and fill his mouth with the pastries Velvela provided, which are excellent.)

Berte makes friends with the fellow passengers, keeps their spirits up. Near them is a family with small children, who delight in Berte's honey-colored hair, held back in a long braid. She tells the children stories to keep them calm when the seas are rough or when people yell too loudly, which is often.

Berte finds someone who knows a little English, cajoles him to tell her the letters. He doesn't remember all of them, but he tells her the ones he remembers. She writes them down and teachers them to the children. She tries to get Krugkoppe to learn them too, this strange new alef-bais. “Ay, bey, gey,” he starts, over and over, and she smiles at him with patience in her sea-green eyes and keeps reminding him, “cey.”

When he meets her eyes, he wants to kiss her. But on this ship they have no privacy, no time to themselves, no ability to be alone like a husband and wife could be.  
  
(“That didn’t stop everyone, though,” Krugkoppe will smirk.  
  
Berte will smack him on the arm, but lightly. “Sha! A shanda far di kinder!”  
  
They will still speak Yiddish to each other, with some Polish phrases sprinkled in, but their children will speak English, only English. Yiddish becomes their private language, where they keep the secrets of their past locked away.)

In a strange way, it is the happiest time of Krugkoppe’s life so far. He has worries, he has fears, he has no idea what is to come in Amerika, he has no idea who he will be or what path his life will take -- but for all of that, Berte is by his side.

“When we are in Amerika, will you miss anything about Taykh Taykh?” Berte asks him as they lie together one night, her voice reaching him over the background noises of the ship.

“No,” Krugkoppe says. “I’m bringing the best of it with me.”

He cannot see her smile in the dimness. “A tongue of honey,” she says playfully. “I mean it. Will you miss anything? Anyone?”  
  
Krugkoppe considers for a moment. “Avrum,” he says finally, thinking of his redheaded friend, who Krugkoppe had once considered the luckiest man he knew.

“I’ll miss Avrum too,” Berte says sadly. “And Velvela.”

“ _You’ll_ miss Velvela,” Krugkroppe grumbles.

“I’ll miss the river,” Berte says.

“There will be rivers in Amerika,” Krugkoppe says.

“Do you promise me, Krugkoppe?”

“I promise, Berte.”

(They will live on an island in two rivers for the rest of their lives together. Whenever they can, they go to the riverfront, and watch the ships go by.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yiddish-English translations:
> 
> alef-bais - the Yiddish term for the alphabet. Yiddish is a mishmash of Hebrew and German, and the order of the alef-bais goes alef (a), bet (b), gimmel (g).  
> “Sha! A shanda far di kinder!” -- "Shh, it's embarrassing [in front of] the kids."
> 
> Some elements of these first few chapters are grounded in Karen Hesse's "Letters from Rifka", a children's novel which was my first introduction to the lengths that immigrants went through to come to Amerika.


	2. name

The first time Krugkoppe calls Berte his wife, it's to an immigration official, at Ellis Island.

They are married but they don't say it out loud, as though to do so would cause the evil eye to fix on them. They have no proof except for the look in their eyes, the pride Krugkoppe has when he looks at Berte, the way she smiles, the way they embrace when they see the Lady Liberty in the harbor, lighting the way.

He is half-convinced he’s in a dream. Perhaps he is. Perhaps the only reason Berte is by his side is to escape Takyh Taykh and the match that was made for her. Perhaps she will leave him immediately, once her feet touch the ground. Perhaps this is all a dream conjured by his empty belly, and he is still fourteen and freezing by the river.

But then he feels Berte’s hand tighten on his and blinks the dybbuk’s thoughts away, stands straight and determined.

Once they are off the boat and on the tiny gateway island, almost to Amerikan soil, they do not speak out loud to each other, not until they are at the front of the line of immigrants, standing in front of an official, a bored, heavyset man in a military-style coat who is smoking. There is a translator by his side, a thin man who barks at them in Polish and German but not Yiddish.

He's processing them, like he processes hundreds of people every day. All immigrants searching for a better life. All people who have risked everything to come to Amerika.

He doesn't even look at Krugkoppe in the eye, so preoccupied with his list. "Name, age, and occupation," he says.

Krugkoppe stutters a little as he says his name -- not his real name, of course, but the only name he's been called, ever since he was a boy. He gives his occupation as “builder”, what he did to earn just enough zlotys back in Taykh Taykh to keep from starving -- but really, the only thing he’s ever done is dream of something else. 

But as he says, "my wife, Berte," his voice is strangely confident -- strange to him that it should be so confident, but for her to be his wife is the only thing he is confident about, strangers in this new strange land. He is blinking in the bright light but she's still there, flesh and blood, her hand gripping his.

"Surname," says the fat man again, barked at them in the ugly Polish tongue by the thin man, and Krugkoppe is confused by this word he’s never heard before.

He's holding up the line and the man is getting impatient. Krugkoppe is afraid of saying the wrong thing, of this man marking his coat with a chalk mark, of being turned away from Amerika and Berte’s side.

A woman comes up to him, a pleasantly ugly lady with hair in an untidy bun. She smiles at the man and says something fast to him, in words Krugkoppe does not understand. She then speaks to Berte and Krugkoppe in Yiddish, but with an accent they've never heard before. "He just needs a name. Tell him a word to describe yourselves, to finish his silly list. Once you're done here, you'll get a physical and then you'll be let in. Don't worry, HIAS will be here for you."

What word does Krugkoppe use, to describe himself, his first day in a strange new land, with everything new and unfamiliar?

"I'm a lucky man," he says to the man, who writes it down, looks for the next person in line.

That is the day that Berte and Krugkoppe get a last name and become the Mazelman family.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dybbuk - demon, used here as a general personification of"evil thoughts".  
> zloty - a Polish currency. For those curious, Berte and Krugkoppe hail from Galicia, chosen partially because they're on the sweet side of the gefilte fish line.   
> Mazel - luck
> 
> You did not need papers or a passport or a visa to immigrate to America when traveling through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. The chalk mark that Krugkoppe worries about is real -- while the vast majority of immigrants were passed through quickly, chalk marks were put on the coats of anyone who was thought to be sick, lame, handicapped, or likely to become a public burden. Many of the Jewish immigrants of this time period were helped by members of HIAS -- the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which is still an organization helping immigrants and refugees today. https://www.hias.org/who/history
> 
> Mazelman is a real (if uncommon) Jewish last name, in circumstances much like Krugkoppe's. 
> 
> Chag sameach!


	3. home

**Home**

The HIAS lady keeps smiling at them, her hair wisping out of her bun. “You’re so sweet together. How long have you been married?”

“Two weeks,” Krugkoppe answers, as Berte says, “three years.”

The HIAS lady blinks in polite confusion as their voices overlap. Krugkoppe’s eyes crinkle in a silent question as he looks down at Berte, her chin jutted out, a serene smile on her face. _Were you serious?_ he marvels.

“My apologies,” Krugkoppe says to the HIAS lady. “I misunderstood your question. We’ve been married for three years, but traveling for two weeks. But we don’t have any papers, our ketubah -- ”

“Don’t worry,” the HIAS lady reassures them. “Many people come here with nothing. We’ll help you.”

And help she does, guiding them to the kosher kitchen HIAS runs on Ellis Island, her eyebrows raising at the amount of the plain but good food Krugkoppe eats, then showing them to the ferry that will take them to Nyu York proper. They are met there by another HIAS lady, also with a wispy bun (though her hair is silver instead of brown), who takes them to the building that will be their first home in Amerika.

The building is crowded, swarming with people, families speaking different languages. Krugkoppe remembers the ship, wonders if he’ll ever see anyone from the ship again. The HIAS lady marches up the dim steps, unconcerned at the smells or sounds, so Berte and Krugkoppe follow.   
  
Their apartment is small, three rooms. Only the front room facing the courtyard gets natural light from the outside: the kitchen and the tiny bedroom are dark, with only rickety furniture, a wobbly table and two chairs, a single bedframe and old mattress. The HIAS lady shows them around, explains how the water closet in the hallway works, tells them that she has arranged a job for Krugkoppe at a junkshop and for Berte at a shirtwaist factory, all of this in a brisk fashion, as though she has done this hundreds of times before.

A knock on the door startles Krugkoppe. He answers it to see another woman -- this one nearly as tall as him, and larger than him by far, her arms piled high with bags. Her hair is hidden under a brightly-colored kerchief: Krugkoppe can’t tell if she is from HIAS without seeing if she has a bun.

“Out of my way, bubelah,” she tells Krugkoppe. “I have to set up for Shabbat before the sun sets.”

Was it almost Shabbat already? Krugkoppe has no idea. He watches as she opens bundle after bundle, taking out a tablecloth, candlesticks, a small bottle of wine, two loaves of challah. “A gift for tonight,” she says brusquely, smacking his hand away as he smells roast chicken. The HIAS lady leaves in the chaos of the machashaifeh’s wake.

“Where’s the kalekeh? Come here, maydeleh,” she says. “You, boychik, get lost. I need to talk to your girl.” She takes Berte by the hand and led her into the bedroom, unsnapping a folded sheet as she goes. Krugkoppe, at a loss, walks out into the hallway, inspects the water closet. With the builder’s eye imparted to him from Avrum’s father Freyde, he can tell that it is much newer than the rest of the building, and not necessarily that well-made. Still, he gets some enjoyment out of making the water drain out and then flow back into the bowl, and seeing the little rough paper spin on its roll, until the machashaifeh finally leaves.

“Krugkoppe?” calls Berte’s gentle voice from the hallway, and he exits to see her at the door to the apartment -- their apartment.

“What did she want to talk to you about?” Krugkoppe asks curiously.

Berte’s cheeks grow pink. Krugkoppe can’t help but notice how beautiful she is. “Geburth kontrol,” she says.

“What’s that?”

“So that we...” She stops, then starts again. “So that I do not become a mother, but we can still have pleasure.”

Suddenly, Krugkoppe is very red, something much less attractive than Berte’s deep flush.

“Come in, it’s almost time for candlelighting,”

He stands awkwardly in the doorway, unable to follow her back in.

“Krugkoppe?”

“I don’t -- “ he chokes. “I don’t want you to think that I -- I don’t -- I don’t expect you, Berte, to feel as though you must -- if you don’t want to, that is -- you do not have to -- ”

Berte watches him closely and says nothing.

“We can continue to sleep as we did on the ship, if that’s what you want. I am the luckiest man alive just to be by your side, for the rest of our lives, if that’s all you want, I would be content -- “

“I would not be, you dumkopf,” Berte says, and kisses him.

She kisses him until he kisses back, she kisses him until both of their mouths are open and their tongues are touching, she kisses him and he kisses her back until he is a rock and can barely move, can barely think for all of the wanting that she has opened up inside of him.

“Berte,” he tries one last time. “I have never done this before.”

“Neither have I,” she says practically, and then they are both laughing, and then they are both kissing.

That first Shabbat in Amerika, they do not remember to light candles until it is too late. So once they remember, they eat the food that left for them in the dark, and return quickly to the bedroom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> translator notes:  
> ketubah - Jewish ritual marriage contract   
> bubelah - a term of affection  
> machashaifeh - witch (possibly with a b, from Krugkoppe's perspective)  
> kalekeh - described in Yiddish-English dictionaries as "a new bride who cannot even boil an egg", here said with some affection.  
> maydeleh - young woman  
> Geburth kontrol - the period-appropriate phrase for "birth control".   
> dumkopf - idiot
> 
> Again, everything about HIAS is true! Same with the tenement buildings and with the toilets -- it would be a fairly rare experience for an older tenement building to have indoor toilets, but they have a building owner who is very fearful of violating building codes. 
> 
> You are technically supposed to light Shabbat candles before the sun sets, as you're not supposed to light fires on Shabbat. It's a mitzvah to light Shabbat candles, but it's also a mitzvah for a married couple to have relations on Shabbat, so in my personal opinion, I think they net out ahead mitzvah-wise. (Moreso, because the relations continue until nearly Sunday morning.) IANAR (I Am Not a Rabbi).


	4. fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning: this chapter has some graphic and gruesome descriptions of death, especially surrounding fires and falling from buildings. 
> 
> _“People survived thanks to a short head start, or a seat assignment near an exit, or by following the right mad rush in one direction or another -- or by ignoring the wrong rush. They survived by acting a bit more quickly, or boldly, or brutally. But the truth is that most people working on the ninth floor that day did not survive at all.”_ David von Drehle, “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America”

They argue that morning. They never used to argue, but the seven days of labor a week, the long hours, the low pay, the tiny dark rooms -- it has an effect, even on people who are so much in love.

That morning Krugkoppe is angry because he finds pamphlets from that _kochleffl_ Lemlich in the apartment, rabblerousing screeds printed on cheap paper with ink that rubs off on your fingers. He is afraid, and the only outlet he has is anger.

“You will lose your job, Berte!” he hisses. “They will find this, they will fire you, they will blacklist you -- “

“It’s not worth it keeping such a job!”

“A job is a job and all masters are terrible! You don’t realize that you’re not a spoiled child working in your parents’ shop any longer! Work is hard! My work is hard too! I pick through junk and garbage all day, the soles of my shoes are worn out -- ”

“You can see the sun during the day!” she shouts back at him. “They lock the doors so we can’t leave to pee! Only the Triangle does this! In factories with a union, they let their workers sit down, they let them use the toilets -- “

“And they don’t hire as many people as the big shops, you don’t want to be out of work, we’ll have no money for food -- “

“Feh, you’ll never go hungry, you can always find onions growing in the ground next to your stupid head!”

“Go bang your head against the wall!”

“I should have such quiet!” She grabs her purse, leaves with her coat still half-buttoned.

It is the Shabbat again, a beautiful day in late March, but it has been a long time since they have been able to spend Shabbat entwined with each other. They are so tired, always tired.

He’ll make it up to her. He always does.

\---

It is nearly five o’clock and he should leave the junk shop, but it is pleasant sometimes to spend a moment with the other junk peddlers, joking and laughing, sprawled out on a crate. Reb Brenner is a good man, an immigrant himself who worked his way up to owning his own shop, who always has an ear to listen to a poor immigrant boy’s woes. He has a beautiful wife and five daughters, who sometimes come to his shop and chatter curiously about every little thing. It’s a life Krugkoppe can aspire to, especially on days when his arms and legs are sore from his heavy cart and his fingernails cracked from picking up scraps of wool and metal.

The men are talking about baseball, a game Krugkoppe neither understands nor cares about but he’s happy to listen, when Picklenose, known and named for the ugly pickle-shaped wart on his nose, runs into the shop, out of breath. “Terrible, terrible,” he says, “there was a big fire at the Triangle Factory in Washington Square -- “

Krugkoppe doesn’t realize he’s getting up but he’s out the door and running as fast he can _. Berte -- !_

\---

He can’t get close to the building, there are too many people, too much of a crowd pressing into the streets. Horses are neighing, people are screaming, but the noise seems strangely distant to Krugkoppe’s ears. The smoke is billowing into the sky and everything is covered in a layer of pale grey ash.

The ninth-floor windows, the windows of the floor where Berte works, have been blown out. The fire escape is twisted, broken off the building from the weight of the people who piled onto it, seeking refuge.

He stops behind a well-dressed woman who is weeping, he cranes over her head and sees the bodies, there are bodies, charred bodies on the street, the bodies of people who jumped from the windows while their clothing, their flesh was on fire.

He wants to call out her name, but he doesn’t want to not receive an answer.

And then, suddenly, at the edge of his vision, a familiar figure in a threadbare grey hat -- “Krugkoppe?”

He starts, he shakes himself like a dog, he spins her around and kisses her and even as he does he doesn’t quite believe she’s real. Her face is stained with tears, making trails in the ash.

“How did you -- ?”

“I wasn’t in the building,” she says in a broken whisper. “I left early to go to a meeting, for starting a union. I didn’t want to tell you, I didn’t want you to be mad. My friend Sadie stayed behind to collect my pay for me, I can’t find her now. What if -- ?”

(Berte will be the one to identify Sadie’s burned and broken body, only recognizable by the locket she wore, and write the letter to her family across the sea.)

Krugkoppe can’t think of what to say. He presses her into his chest, holds her tight, feels the bones of her back through her thin clothes. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I’m sorry.”

Krugkoppe vows to himself then that no matter what cause Berte takes up, he will support her fully. And he keeps that promise to the end of her life.

(Berte will become an organizer, to make sure that her fellow immigrants have a voice, and to ensure that they never get stuck behind a locked door again.)

(She will be so excited to vote for the first time she is able to, in 1917, and then she will get upset when none of the candidates she supported win. So she will encourage her fellow union members to vote, too.)

(Many years in the future, Berte will give a speech at a 1937 rally in Madison Square Garden, speaking on the same stage as the heads of the CIO and the American Jewish Congress, exhorting her fellow workers to unite against the oncoming Nazi threat. Krugkoppe will listen to her speak directly to the people gathered there, hoisting their youngest child on his shoulders, and his heart will feel like it will burst with pride and love for the woman that the cooper’s daughter has become.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> translation notes:
> 
> kochlefl - shit-stirrer. (Krugkoppe is specifically referring to Clara Lemlich, later Clara Lemlich Shavelson, one of the most famous of the "farbrente Yidishe meydlekh [fiery Jewish girls]" who led many of the labor protests in that era of NYC.)  
> Reb - roughly "Mr." 
> 
> Reb Brenner and his daughters, as well as Picklenose, are affectionately borrowed from Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family books. (Brenner was Taylor's maiden name.) The first book is set in 1912 and in the Lower East Side, and it has been a hugely influential series for me. 
> 
> When I started writing this story, I had planned for Berte to be a survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 26th, 1911, and this would be the turning point in her life towards becoming a labor organizer. But as I researched the fire more, I realized that the fire which claimed 146 lives, mostly of immigrant woman in their teens and early twenties, was over in barely fifteen minutes. There was no way that Berte could be on the floor and survive, so the story changed to accommodate that. My biggest regret is that because of this, I don’t get to show the heroism of the elevator operators, Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillalo, who brought their elevator cars _up_ into the raging fire multiple times to bring out the garment workers. Author David von Drehle estimates they rescued about 150 people in doing so. May their names be remembered.


	5. pops

“I brought you some celery soda from the delicatessen to help with your belly,” Krugkoppe says as he comes in the door. 

Arnold, his head on a pillow, flops the other way on the sofa. It is amazing how a boy of ten, allegedly home from school because he was “so sick I’m almost dying, Pops, there’s no way I can go to school today,” can pack so much disdain into his body movements.

“And a pastrami sandwich for you. And one for me. And if you don’t eat yours, I’ll eat yours. No sense wasting good food.” 

“It’s not good food,” Arnold mutters.

“And I got you the funnies, too. The ones with the pictures that you like.” 

“I don’t like them.”

“All the boys like them. That’s what Mister Katz says, and he sells them to every boy. You’ll be set once I have to go back to the shop.” Krugkoppe unfolds the papers he bought for himself: The Times, The Forward, and The Daily Worker. You had to read all three papers lately and read between the lines to even get a glimpse of what was really happening in Europe. 

“I don’t like them,” Arnold repeats, propping himself up on his elbows. “They’re all superheroes lately. I hate them.”

“Superheroes?” Krugkoppe stumbles over the unfamiliar word.

“Men with powers. Like the supernatural.” Arnold rolls his eyes. “It’s all stupid. There ought to be comics about normal people, and there aren’t any like that lately.” A pause. “Besides, the other boys at school claimed all the good ones.”

Krugkoppe hides his expression behind the newspaper page. Sadie and Dora had both taken after their mother: smart, friendly, well-liked, and driven. Both are now in college, studying hard, happy as far as Krugkoppe can tell. Only Arnold, their youngest by several years, seems to be like his father, a loner and a dreamer, unable to find his place. Sometimes, their similarities are so much a muchness that Krugkoppe doesn’t know what to say, afraid of making things worse. 

He wishes Berte were there.

As if he can read his father’s mind, Arnold asks, “when’s Ma getting back?”

“On Friday, she’s in Chicago now.”

“I wish she was here,” Arnold whines. “I miss her reading to me.”

“I can read to you,” Krugkoppe says.

“I want Ma. You take too long and you stumble over too many words.” 

Children’s words are daggers. “Well, your mother is doing something important,” Krugkoppe says vaguely. “Her speeches, she’s raising money for good causes -- “

“How come you don’t do anything important, Pops?”

When Krugkoppe was a child, if he’d used such an insolent tone in front of his father, his teachers, even a man from the town, he would have been hit. He lowers his newspaper. “What do you mean?” he asks mildly.

“You go to the store, you come back from the store, that’s all you do.”

“I also got you a sandwich.” Arnold rolls his eyes again. “Keep doing that, boychik, your face will stick that way.”

“Did you always really want to run a junk shop?” Arnold asks. “Was that what you wanted to do as a boy like me?”

Krugkoppe is, for a moment, lost for words. “I didn’t know there were such things as a boy,” he says finally.

“Tell me about when you were a boy,” Arnold says. “Ma does, she talks about growing up with auntie Velvela all the time -- “

“Tante Velvela talks too much,” Krugkoppe mutters.

“ -- but you, I don’t know anything about you.”

He pauses, taken aback. “My life started when I met your mother,” he says finally, “and I don’t like thinking about other parts of it without her.”

Arnold slumps down, disappointed.

“We had a friend, though -- we haven’t seen him in many, many years,” Krugkoppe continues. “His name was Avrum, and he was the luckiest boy in the entire shtetl of Taykh Taykh. If he tripped over his shoelaces, he’d find a shiny kopek on the ground as he got up. His hair was so red, you could spot it from all the way across the field.”

“Did he play baseball?” Arnold asks.

“Baseball is an American game. None of us knew what baseball was then. But he could kick a ball farther than any other boy in the village. Once, he kicked the ball all the way onto the roof of the butcher shop. Now, the butcher was the meanest man in the village, and if we told him the ball was there, he would take it for himself and never give it back. So Avrum devised a plan…”

He talks and talks, about Avrum and Reuven and Kreindel and the scrapes they got into and the fun they had, until their forms seem to be real in the little front room. Arnold listens intently until his eyes close and his breathing becomes regular.

Krugkoppe covers up Arnold with his blanket and tenderly strokes a lock of hair off his forehead before he tucks the newspapers under his arm. He leaves the apartment and locks the door. He checks their mailbox: nothing with stamps from Europe, the only mail he cares about.

Before he returns to the junk shop, he takes a moment to say a prayer to the God he doesn’t believe in, for the safety and good health of his friends from long ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we had something like a twenty-five year time-skip in the last lines of the last chapter, and time will just keep on skipping from here on out. 
> 
> translator notes:  
> tante - aunt  
> shtetl - a small town
> 
> Celery soda is/was a mainstay of old-school Jewish delicatessens. I have had one, once, many years ago, and I nearly choked.
> 
> The Forward is a Yiddish-language paper, The Daily Worker is a Socialist paper.
> 
> I am loving hearing from everyone who is touched by this little story, from those who recognize aspects of themselves or their family, to the people who have never thought of any characters fitting in this way or this AU and are happy to discover a whole new world. Your comments and reblogs are making me so, so happy <3 Feel free to message me or contact me -- you can find me at stirringsofconsciousness.tumblr.com.


	6. yizkor

The year that Berte and Krugkoppe leave for Amerika, Taykh Taykh is a shtetl of two thousand Jews.

Velvela reads the tea leaves early. When her husband won’t leave his thriving business, she leaves him instead, and finds a husband who will take her across the sea to safety in New York. Her arrival in the spring of 1934 is heralded in newspapers, and Berte comes to the port that day to greet her like a sister. They are an odd duo, the socialist and the socialite, but they work together in perfect harmony, like not a day has gone by. Velvela plans fundraisers and Berte finds speakers for them, or speaks herself.

Berte writes to her sister Perle, to her parents, to Krugkoppe’s sister, to all the friends and family she’s stayed in touch with over letters for nearly thirty years. She offers to sponsor visas, to buy tickets, guarantee jobs, to do whatever she can to help.

In August 1939, the visas for Perle’s family are finally issued. Only the two youngest children can make it to the ship. They are twins, a boy and a girl, pale red-headed children who don’t speak a word of English, who have barely heard of these distant family members, the aunt and uncle embracing them so tightly, the cousins jabbering away.

The twins are the only members of Berte and Krugkoppe’s family in Europe who will survive the coming war.

(Avrum will show up at their door one day, nearly skeletal but smiling, long after they’ve given up hope.

“I remembered your name,” he’ll say, embracing Krugkoppe like a brother. “There’s only one of you in all of Amerika!”)

The year that Berte and Krugkoppe leave for Amerika, Taykh Taykh is a shtetl of two thousand Jews.

By the end of the war, only four will still be alive, all of them living in Amerika.

Years and years from now, Krugkoppe will take out a map to show their grandchildren, all curious eyes and bouncing curls, where he and their grandmother once lived and loved and left, but the village is no longer listed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yizkor - literally "he will remember", the name of the prayer for the memory of the dead.


	7. book

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so, I missed the Chanukah deadline, but hey, there's always Tu B'Shevat.

When their eldest daughter Sadie is born, Berte makes a rule: every night they would read to their child in English, so that she would learn to love to read at a very early age. Krugkoppe agrees, and hunts out any scrap of reading material from his junk hauls, getting together a little library of their own on the Lower East Side of discarded magazines and books. Sometimes the pages are still uncut when he finds them and brings them home.

He reads to them, Berte reads to them, and soon the girls read to themselves and to their baby brother. They are faster at English than Krugkoppe is, and soon lose patience with his halting command of vowels and consonants. 

“English iz meshugas,” he gripes to Berte, who nods consolingly and takes over the night readings. 

(Sadie and Dora both love to read and write, win prizes for their essays at school contests, but pick more practical careers for college. Sadie studies anesthesiology, works at Presbyterian Hospital under Dr. Virginia Apgar. Dora becomes a teacher, works in public schools. Arnold goes to college for a little less than a year, then drops out to start a comic book company with a couple of friends, publishing schlock jokes for nickels. Krugkoppe is the angriest he‘s ever been with Velvela when he finds out she's been underwriting Arnold's share. It takes both Berte’s and Avrum’s greatest efforts to calm him down.)

He reads English now. Of course he reads. He is a thirsty man, thirsty for knowledge, thirsty for safety, thirsty for some respect, too. In Taykh Taykh he lived by his wits, was known to be the smartest boy in the village (though Berte was always his superior). It hurts his pride the way that strangers assume that he is only a junkman, that he is too simple to understand them. His halting delivery makes strangers sneer and his children groan, so he stops. 

So he doesn’t try to read English out loud for nearly twenty years, because of his halting delivery, and he is ashamed. Not until Jan arrives.

\---

Krugkoppe’s heart is open to the new children, but it is also hardened. They come to Amerika along with news of the war, of the death of hope for all the family and friends left behind. It is hard not to see them as an omen of death and devastation.

The girl wins them all over quickly. Karolina is a little beauty, and has the trick of being someone who others want to please: perhaps this makes all of life easier. Her dramatic personality makes them all laugh, and they take joy in how she revels in her new life in Amerika. She takes to English eagerly, so she can better understand the movies in the cinema, where she goes every weekend, often taken out by her adoring older cousins, and her accent takes on a distinctive quality of Katherine Hepburn. She covers her side of the bedroom in pictures from magazines, asks to be addressed not as Karolina Brzezinski but as Carole Bloom, and talks openly of wanting to be on screen, a star herself. 

But Jan is as silent as his sister is ebullient. He does not speak, he barely eats. He takes no interest in comic books or ball games, but stares. He responds to neither Yiddish nor English, only Polish, which only Krugkoppe can converse in -- but Polish for him is the language of the taverns where Krugkoppe’s father drank, the language of goyische bullies who took pride in tormenting the smart-mouthed Jew-boy, so trying to talk to this sullen little boy brings Krugkoppe back to a life he’d rather forget.

And Jan is the spitting image of his father, who was the bullies’ ringleader when it came to Krugkoppe. He has never mentioned this to Berte, who had barely met her sister’s husband before her sister eloped. Perhaps Janus does not know that his wife’s sister is married to the child he once tormented. Perhaps Janus tormented so many little Jewish boys that Krugkoppe would not stick out in his memory.

Perhaps the measure of a man is not how he acted as a child. This may be so, but surely it doesn't say anything good about him, either.

Krugkoppe lets all of this swirl inside his head as he wakes Jan up in the morning, coaxes him to eat, dresses him, reads him Arnold’s old comic books, takes him to Central Park, gives him candies for every word of English he masters, plays ball with him, blesses him before Shabbat dinners. Berte would be better at this, but Berte is busy, crisscrossing the country with Velvela to raise money for the Jews in Europe, volunteering at the Red Cross when she is home, so Krugkoppe does what he can, his contribution to the war effort. 

It is not Jan’s fault that Jan looks so much like his father, that he has nothing of his mother in his face, nor anything of Berte -- nu, there is a little bit, a determined tilt to his chin sometimes. It is not Jan’s fault that he is here and yet Krugkoppe has not received a single letter from his sister since the war began.

(He will never receive another letter from her. Decades in the future, he will be holding his great-granddaughter Jessica’s hand as they walk through a museum exhibit on partisan resistance fighters of World War II, and he will stop cold as he sees his sister’s face in a photograph, eyes blazing, holding a rifle.)

And slowly, slowly, the ice in Jan’s eyes thaws. Slowly, slowly, he learns English, first to read the comics himself, then to read anything he can. When he starts high school, he changes his name like his sister did, to be easier for English-speaking tongues -- but to Jon Mazelman. 

Krugkoppe’s older children are growing up, falling in love, getting married while Jon and Carole are still in school. Sadie marries a man she meets in medical school and they both work together at Presbyterian Hospital, her in obstetrics, him in surgery. Somehow, their schedules match enough that they make two children. Arnold, his company a success, marries a girl he meets at a party who thinks he hangs the moon and stars, and they move out to Hicksville, on Long Island, and he commutes to the city every day and keeps her in bonbons while she raises the kids.

(Dora, always the most independent, doesn’t marry, but has an apartment with a roommate in Greenwich Village. One night, Krugkoppe asks Berte if she thinks Dora will ever move out and get married. Berte, not even glancing up from her book, says, “are you joking me? They’re roommates like Kreindel and Mendel were.”)

(Dora’s roommate is a very pretty girl, with dark eyes and dimples. Krugkoppe makes a point of inviting her to Friday night dinners, after that.)

Carole goes to school for fashion design, living with roommates, but Jon stays at home the longest as he works through college, working shifts at the junk shop to earn money for his own typewriter. At nights he types in the bedroom he used to share with Arnold, now empty. 

The week before graduation, he announces to Berte and Krugkoppe that he has written a novel, tells them it’s inspired by them and their life and their love, asks if he can dedicate it to them. 

Krugkoppe is proud of all five of his children, but this might be his proudest moment of all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> translator notes:  
> English iz meshugas - English is crazy (a sentence I have said many times)  
> schlock - low-quality, crappy  
> goyische - Gentile, non-Jewish (here used derogatorily)
> 
> the inspiration for Krugkoppe's sister being a partisan resistance fighter is from WolfofAnsbach's awesome AU of this AU, which traces what happens to the people of Taykh Taykh who stayed behind. read it here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22041502/chapters/52604668 (warning, very dark)
> 
> one chapter left!


	8. luck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not done by the end of Chanukah, but done before tu b'shevat! 
> 
> if you're reading this on February 8th, this is your last chance to vote for me in the 6th annual bughead fanfiction awards, where this fic was nominated for multi AU and under the radar. (I myself am also nominated for an author award for AU.): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScUV3VIagW0ohQp7-JUYiOkq8HTpFkyb35kA2fOhjIbrxLWow/viewform

As a boy, no matter what was happening around him or to him, Krugkoppe was always able to find refuge in stories.

He’d read anything that he could come across, in Polish or Yiddish. A newspaper, a pamphlet, a textbook. A street sign, if that was all that was available to him. Sometimes reading recipes were as close as he could come to eating a cooked meal.

But his favorites were always the folk tales. Hershel of Ostropol, Froyim Greidinger -- the pranksters, the jesters, the little heroes of folklore, always with a ready quip. It showed him a world where the heroes were not always the strong men who could win a fight, nor the wealthy men who could buy their way out of problems, but sometimes the clever man who can think their way free.

In his younger days, he would try writing his own stories, too -- on fresh sheets of paper when he had it, on the edges of newspapers when he didn’t. Late at night, after a lengthy day of construction with Freyde, he would sit up with a candle stun and try to set words to his little stash of paper the phrases he had thought of that day, connecting them into a narrative that might interest someone other than himself.

The words rarely came out of his head right, somehow, and he wasn’t very sorry to leave them behind when he left Taykh Taykh. Truly, he had taken everything that mattered with him. Truly, it was better to have Berte smiling at him, her eyes glowing with love and pride, to kiss her lips and her body until she called out his name in joy. To have children with her -- five children, really, even if they weren’t all his flesh and blood. To see them grow up and succeed at what they chose to do -- this was more important than his little words, tossed together. 

(When Carole makes her debut on Broadway, in the new Rodgers and Hammerstein show, Allegro!, Berte and Krugkoppe come to watch on opening night. She gets them tickets, much nicer seats than any they’ve ever sat in before, when they’ve only been able to sit in the cheap seats in the back. They can’t follow the show, really they don’t understand it at all, but they love seeing their youngest daughter sing and dance on stage.)

If he were to be truly honest, he had tried to write, in the years before Sadie and then Dora had come along. But it was hard to write when your head is speaking one language and your mouth is speaking another. The words that came out onto the page were a mishmash, ugly. 

But now, his children are grown and off on their own careers, and he has been speaking English, really only English, for longer than he ever spoke Yiddish as a child. He is working less, only a few days a week at the junk shop. His excuses are disappearing.

\--

It is a joke, or an impulse, or an indulgence for Krugkoppe himself, one day, when he rents a post office box and starts sending out manuscripts. Scripts, really. Silly scripts, based on his childhood in Taykh Taykh, on the stories he told the younger children. 

He doesn’t want to depend on Arnold or Jon, doesn’t want it to seem like he’s imposing on their successes. He wants to be independent, so he sends them off under the name he was born with, a name he hasn’t used in over fifty years. It is a name that is strange to see on his painstakingly-typed pages, typed one letter at a time on Jon’s old typewriter that he labors over when Berte is asleep or away giving speeches.

(She wants to travel less. Her body is starting to ache. “I’m getting old,” she says, looking in the mirror, but in Krugkoppe’s eyes she is as young and beautiful as the night they met by the river in Taykh Taykh and he took her hands for the first time.)

He sends off three of the stories he wrote, along with a few sketches and a self-addressed stamped envelope, to Arnold’s comic book publishing company. He has listened to his son talk about what makes a good comic, after all, his son earnestly lecturing his father in justifying his life choices. 

(Arnold is always the most pompous of their five children, the one most concerned with how things appear rather than how things are. Krugkoppe wonders if he would be diminished in his son’s eyes if he knew that his father was the son of a shikker, or if it would humble him. Berte frequently assures Krugkoppe of Arnold’s good heart and that it wouldn't matter, but some things, Krugkoppe thinks, maybe a son should not know about his father, to keep his pride high.)

Arnold is always complaining about the lack of variety in the stories, the bad work ethic of the young men he employs. Perhaps, Krugkoppe reasons, his stories will appear to Arnold like fresh water in a desert. He has also listened to his son mutter about the money costs of returning manuscripts, so perhaps the envelope will be a nice touch.

He doesn’t tell even Berte that he’s writing up these stories, much less that he’s sending them out. He wants it to be a surprise, a gift he can lay at her feet, a proof, a validating proof at last for her, that she was right to pick him of all the other boys of Taykh Taykh, the one to run away with, the one to build a life with. 

(He knows that she doesn’t need that, but sometimes, he can only admit in the privacy of his own head, he does.)

\---

He only lets himself check the mailbox after he works at the junk shop, because if he allowed himself to check more often, his heart would explode.

Usually, the mailbox is empty, or is full only with flyers advertising things in the city. But today, today, there is a letter, and Krugkoppe's fingers tremble as he recognizes his own handwriting on the address.

He tears open the envelope and reads the letter, a thin typed missive. "Thank you for your submission... interesting take but...no market at the foreseeable time for this type of tale...consider instead submitting to our flagship series..." A series, Krugkoppe knows, that is full of American teenagers laughing and eating milkshakes, a world Krugkoppe knows nothing about. At the bottom of his letter was his son's artful scrawl of a signature in blue ink.   
  
Krugkoppe hold the letter to his chest, sets his jaw against a sudden tightness in his throat. He wishes for a moment for his childhood cap to hide his face behind, afraid that he might embarrass himself by crying -- in a public place, no less.

But instead, what comes out is a chuckle, a chortle, soon a full-fledged laugh. And yes, the tears come, but only tears of laughter, at how silly the whole situation had become. The secrecy, the subterfuge, over telling stories of all things.

He will tell Berte what happened that day, he will show her the letter and hear her outrage on her behalf. Berte’s wrath is fearsome when necessary: this will be worse for Arnold than the time he said something complimentary about the House committee's Mr. Nixon. Berte will laugh, too, and she will get Arnold to explain the process for applying, and Jon to help him with the letter, and Sadie to tell him where to publish, and Dora and Carole, and Avrum and Velvela, and all their friends, to cheer him on, and remind him that he is not a lone boy, and has not been for a long time. 

And even if he is never published, even if his words only live as a boyhood dream in his head -- so what? Krugkoppe has been, since the day he first saw Berte at the river, the luckiest man in the world. To ask for more would be too much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the final chapter of this particular story, but I am hopeful that this is not the end of me telling stories about Berte and Krugkoppe or the Mazelman family, at different times in their lives. 
> 
> Hershel of Ostropol and Froyim Greidinger are two Yiddish folk heroes who live by their wits: I myself grew up on the stories of Hershel. 
> 
> Allegro! came out in 1947, for those of you keeping track of the timeline. And, as several people have noticed, Arnold is the publisher of a comics company very much like Archie Comics -- a company, I found out as I was starting to write this story, that was founded by the sons of immigrant Jews. 
> 
> I have been so touched and awed at the comments that this has gotten, and of the ways that people have let these characters into their hearts. This has been a joy to write and I truly appreciate everyone who has been reading this and left a comment. I get a little overwhelmed responding to praise, but if you have any questions about the characters or the history behind them, feel free to hit me up in the comments or on my tumblr, stirringsofconsciousness.tumblr.com
> 
> Special thanks go to village_skeptic, who has been my friend and partner-in-historical-crime for actual decades and helped me knock around a lot of the concepts, and to whatwillthegirlbecome, whose pure joy at Berte and Krugkoppe is akin to divine inspiration.


End file.
